Real-Time Trajectory Generation for the Cooperative Path Planning of Multi-Vehicle Systems1

This paper discusses a Cooperative Path Planning (CPP) design methodology for multi-vehicle systems and a Nonlinear Trajectory Generation (NTG) algorithm. Three scenarios of multi-vehicle tasking are proposed at the CPP framework. The NTG algorithm is, then, used to generate realtime trajectory for desired vehicle activities. Given system dynamics and constraints, the NTG algorithm first finds trajectory curves in a lower dimensional space and, then, parameterizes the curves by the B-spline basis. The coefficients of the B-splines are further solved by the sequential quadratic programming to satisfy the optimization objectives and constraints. The NTG algorithm has been implemented to generate real-time trajectories for a group of cooperative vehicles in the presence of changing missions and constraints.